


Knight of Light (Dying Alone)

by lesbianjanecrocker (fumiko6)



Series: Pageantverse [4]
Category: Homestuck, Original Work
Genre: Bisexual Character, Chinese Character, Classpects (Homestuck), Current Events, Death, F/F, God Tier (Homestuck), Internalized Transphobia, Lesbian Character, Metagaming, Nuclear Weapons, Pandemics, Quarantine, SBURB (Homestuck), Sburb Fan Session (Homestuck), Science, Trans Female Character, Transitioning via god-tiering, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23960374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fumiko6/pseuds/lesbianjanecrocker
Summary: A sburb AU with a handful of characters from an original story, or something like that. Also taking place in the present day, present time because why not.
Series: Pageantverse [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1327565
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Unity

The world is over. A battle to create a new world is beginning. And you are far too old to be here.

zygoticQuandary: So, how does it feel to be saving the world?  
crypticEmpiricist: Pretty bad actually!  


Karen (Qiuyi) Zhao, the zygoticQuandary in question, might have once been your best friend, or perhaps only friend, or perhaps something else altogether. After a series of intense conversations and secret confessions in the last two years of high school, the frequency of your interactions waned, and eventually ceased. The ravages of time, distance, and anxiety seemed to erase whatever good thing the two of you had going. Until now, at the end of the world. It turns out that being obsessed with a certain problematic webcomic during your teenage years is more helpful than you could have imagined.

ZQ: My quest is, literally, "Become death".  
ZQ: That message was in my dreams constantly, but I didn't understand what it meant until I stumbled upon the Nuevos Alamos labs.  
ZQ: Thus, it means I get to assume my role as the local J. Robert Oppenheimer.  
ZQ: It's called the "Land of Fission and Frogs" for a reason...  
ZQ: Somehow, and I don't know how, this is going to end up with a frog that ends up creating the new universe, if and only if I succeed at these tasks.  
CE: Maybe your dreams aren't exactly a reliable source of information, given the whole horrorterrors thing?  
ZQ: I mean this is the only path that I see going forward.  
ZQ: It makes sense given everything else that's going on in this land.  
CE: So you'll start an impromptu Manhattan Project?  
ZQ: Yeah... So like, I'm going have to to build a nuclear bomb. And set up all the infrastructure and stuff like that.  
CE: Replicating the quandaries of the old world in the new...  
ZQ: lol I'll try not to oppress the iguanas, I guess? Or start a cold war between the kingdoms, or create too many toxic radioactive waste dumps, or something like that...  
ZQ: Actually I don't know if there are even multiple countries here, or like anything about consort politics.  
ZQ: All I have to do is construct a fission device. It's just an engineering problem, nothing more.  
CE: I kind of doubt that, tbh.  


Within your Sburb session is a motley yet strangely homogeneous cast of characters. Besides Karen, there are Xu Yingmei and Qi Jiaren, two Chinese college students who grew up in the same town. Karen met Yingmei at a summer research program, and Yingmei then invited her old friend Jiaren to join in. You're not sure about Jiaren, but Yingmei is also a trans woman. Yingmei was quarantined in California, while Jiaren had returned to their hometown of Shijiazhuang. The two of them mostly keep to themselves, not that you've done much to alter the status quo.

ZQ: I've done enough talking for now; so tell me about your quest and stuff...  
CE: I don't know yet.  
ZQ: Nothing at all?  
CE: I don't have much to go on.  


As a Knight of Light, your role has never been entirely well defined. There is no "canonical" example for your role within a session, so you have to map your own way through this morass (no matter how much you would like to be, you are not Rose Lalonde). Yours is supposed to be the aspect of knowledge according to some official sources, and luck according to others, but you have never felt less knowledgeable or lucky. Being a "Knight" is supposed to be about serving or protecting others according to the wiki, but you are not in a capacity to serve anyone right now. You do have a laser rifle, which is perhaps some kind of "light", but it does not seem to be directly relevant. You are much better with aiming than you expected, which could be an aspect of your powers or the weapon itself.

Your world is the "Land of Stars and Steel", a labyrinthine locale where the starlight above does not penetrate to the steel caverns below, where the artifacts of a glorious technological civilization lay derelict. You have not encountered a single consort or friendly NPC despite all your searching. But many of the artifacts have turned out to be functional, some quite useful as weapons against the hordes of enemy creatures that infest the caverns. You still do not know what your quest is, but it almost certainly involves a dungeon crawl through the bowels of this world.

CE: Anyway, nukes.  
CE: So what kind of nuclear bomb are you making?  
ZQ: Good question...  
ZQ: First, we have the fission-only devices. There's the Little Boy-style "gun" design, and the Fat Man "implosion" type (also used in the Trinity test), plus some variations of those two. Basically both of these designs involve applying a lot of physical force to a radioactive core in order to catalyze nuclear fission and start a chain reaction.  
ZQ: As for thermonuclear devices, there's only essentially one design in our world, the Teller-Ulam design which involves a fission reaction to catalyze a fusion reaction using tritium-deuterium fusion.  
ZQ: Sorry you probably know this already...  
CE: I did but it's fine...  
ZQ: sorry...  
ZQ: But I don't know exactly how I will construct my device(s) yet. I know a bunch of useless facts from reading wikipedia and a bunch of random books, but not how to actually apply them. And the consorts have all deferred to my nonexistent expertise. I think the gun design is the simplest. Or just a replica of the Trinity device but that might actually be more difficult.  
ZQ: Anyway I'm speaking on virtually no knowledge. There are so many technical challenges here: everything from physics to chemistry to every field of engineering except the one I majored in. I'll have to learn how to use magic in order to address any of them.  
ZQ: Sorry, I'm rambling again...  
CE: Don't worry, I love hearing your updates.  
CE: Feel free to let me know if you need anything, although I think you're far more adept at the whole nuke thing than I would be.  
ZQ: Thank you! You can always tell me about things if you'd like too...  
ZQ: But I should actually do my quest. Goodbye for now...  


In the scanners embedded in your glasses, you see more underlings in the distance. You ready your ancient rifle. The enemies have been simple to dispatch thus far, and there is no reason why that will change now. Karen is good at the game, and can handle herself. Hopefully so can you.

* * *

realCrypticEmpiricist: Hello, "Emily".  
RCE: We both know that's not your real name.  
CE: Who are you?  
RCE: I am you from the future.  
RCE: Just kidding. I'm you from the present. A different present. A better one. And I am contacting you within this game so that you may avert certain mistakes.  
CE: Evidence, please?  
RCE: We were born in Austin, Texas, left after fourth grade, and attended *** high school in Massachusetts.  
RCE: Dad's name is Song Chen. You might have thought he was unnecessarily cruel, although I think differently. Mom's name is Jing Zhang. You don't speak to her as often as you should.  
CE: ...okay?  
RCE: You first went back to China when you were seven years old. You got carsick and threw up on your clothes. Your parents and uncle stopped at a store; the only clothes there were girl's clothes so they bought you some. You threw a fit about having to wear girl's clothes, which is as good a sign as any that you are mistaken about the "being a girl" thing.  
RCE: Fast-forward to today. You buy "feminine" clothes off amazon.com despite your steadfast belief that amazon is unethical because you do not have the courage to go to a physical store. I would like to say that it's pathetic, but you are me so I would be "telling on myself", as they say.  
CE: Who are you and why are you talking to me?  
RCE: I want to help you.  
RCE: I would like for you to cut through certain illusions you may have about your current situation, to see the truth behind your present state.  


You end the conversation and immediately block the so-called "realCrypticEmpiricist".

Of course it doesn't work. The name appears back at the top of your contacts list. You uninstall and reinstall the app. Same thing. You re-install Linux. Same thing.

RCE: I'll always be here, you know.  
RCE: I'm always with you.  
CE: Can you please stop? Just go away?  
RCE: You'll understand what I mean eventually.  
RCE: You'll come back. I know it.  


* * *

Your name is Emily Chen and you have always been alone.

Today you wake up in your childhood home. Your college has forced all students out of the dorms and ended in-person classes, and therefore you are back here, in the house in which you resided between the ages of 10 and 18. It is a nondescript room in a relatively generic house in suburban Massachusetts. The walls are white and undecorated as they always have been, the desk empty, the bed covered with blue striped sheets, and the ceiling adorned with only a bare light bulb. This is obviously not what a "girl's room" would look like; it's obviously a boy's room, anyone would say.

It is your first time back after years away, and you will not jeopardize the fragile peace with your choice of attire.

You would like to think that you "pass" like this, but realistically speaking you probably don't. You have more than a year of HRT under your belt and you still do not usually pass when not using your optimized "female presentation". You do not have noticeable breasts or anything like a "feminine figure" (you imagine quotes around the term because while you reject it as a patriarchal construct, those with power over you do not); normally you could strategize with your wardrobe and makeup and so on, but the present circumstances are not amenable. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you feel like shit. On the other hand, passing as a male means that you do not have to face the crushing reality of being a trans woman IRL for now. Maybe if you can play-act an adequate son long enough, your parents will not make you homeless when they realize you are still not their son. 

It is 3pm. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and thousands of people in your state have died. And you are in your room in your parents' house moping about gender as if your minuscule quandaries have any relevance against the crushing maw of the world today.

You put on randomly selected pants, take two multivitamin gummies, and force yourself to open the door.

* * *

ZQ: It's done.  
CE: Oh?  
ZQ: I built it. I tested it. It works.  


Karen sends a video, showing slowed-down footage of a flash of light in the middle of a desert, followed by a cloud growing towards the sky like a tree, and an expanding halo of dust.

ZQ: I call it "Unity", a boring play on Trinity I guess.  
ZQ: It's a simple gun-type design. The consorts are surprisingly technologically sophisticated; they already had the means to construct the various components, so it was just a matter of putting it all together.  
ZQ: The iguanas all clapped when it worked, though.  
CE: Congratulations, I suppose?  
ZQ: It's just the first step.  
ZQ: Apparently there are at least five iguana states on this world and I've inadvertently made one a superpower.  
ZQ: They are asking if we can make more. I'm saying no but they might have the technical skills themselves already.  
ZQ: They're already conscripting workers for the uranium mines.  
ZQ: So basically you were right.  
ZQ: I have a feeling that in order to win my quest I would literally have to create an apocalypse, to "become death" by spreading so much death and destruction that it heralds the Second Coming, or something like that.  
ZQ: I hope that won't be necessary, but like, I don't have any evidence either way.  
ZQ: Oh no. Now the imps are invading. Can't use nukes to deal with them :( Gotta go.  



	2. Interlude: Ashes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for suicidal ideation in Jiaren's section

xuYingmei [XY] opened a memo on board 4 CHINAWOMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE.  
XY: how are you comrades  
XY: how goes the game  
crypticEmpiricist [CE] responded to memo.  
CE: It's a grind for me, as usual so far.  
CE: What's the matter?  
zygoticQuandary [ZQ] responded to memo.  
ZQ: um, it's alright so far...?  
XY: the reason i convened the meeting is to discuss god tiering  
XY: jiaren says that he has discovered his quest bed and is ready to do the deed.  
quantumJumper [QJ] responded to memo.  
QJ: yeah...  
CE: Yeah?  
XY: ive been trying to dissuade him  
XY: because the 'you' that comes back to life after dying is not really the same you  
XY: youll still die  
XY: and the god tiered you is a different person  
XY: whos like you in every way but not really you  
CE: I'm kind of inclined to agree.  
CE: This is like the teleportation problem; if you're destroyed and then reassembled exactly, are you still the same "you"?  
XY: but isnt it just the equivalent of sleeping  
XY: and the atoms in our body and our cells are changing all the time  
XY: our bodies are constantly dying and being rebuilt even in normal times  
CE: With sleeping and regular physical processes, there's still a continuity there that's broken when dying and being reconstructed.  
XY: i dont know about that  
XY: what about passing out or going into a coma  
XY: what if you go into a coma for 1 year and all your cells change  
XY: is it really the same just because the cells dont change all at once  
CE: I thought the neurons mostly weren't regenerated? Or maybe that's just a myth?  
CE: Wait, did you just change your opinion because I agreed with you?  
XY: see i enjoy exploring a good philosophical quandary  
XY: also i saw that well all go god tier eventually  
XY: just some more willingly than others  
XY: even you emily :)  
QJ: hello...  
QJ: while you were talking i died and came back to life.  
QJ: and i'm a girl now.  
QJ: you were right.  
XY: ;)  
QJ: i don't know if i'm the same person or not but i don't really care  
QJ: i think i like it better this way.  
XY: she/her then?  
QJ: sure i guess  


* * *

==> Be Jiaren

Your death bed was a slab of cold stone, colored green with a symbol that Emily had told you meant "mind". It was in a cave, on an island separated from the other lands by chasms. The surface of the "Land of Toxins and Tectonics" is covered with these islands, pieces of land jutting upward from what seem like bottomless fissures, torn apart and reshaped by earthquakes.

Your death bed was uncomfortable. The hours in which you spent there did not acclimate you to the discomfort. Instead every moment brought a different kind of ache, a different shade of pain. Each ache brought a welcome reminder of the inevitability of death.

It was easy enough to die. Every time you sleep is like a death, where you mourn the you of yesterday and welcome in the you of tomorrow (you were never very good at letting yourself falling asleep). How is this any different? Emily raised doubts, but your understanding of reality was more correct. You are an abstract pattern of consciousness, not necessarily tied to any physical manifestation. And besides, you had practiced for this moment before, in moments long since past. Nevertheless, you wondered what would happen once you died. Perhaps it would be nothingness, just the endless embrace of the unknown. Perhaps, as Emily said, the "you" that reawakened would not *really* be the same as the "you" that died. But you have never accepted the opinions of strangers.

You had a vial of the planet's water. You drank it. The pain stopped. Your mind went blank, and then you awoke again, in a new body.

Your new body is different, in ways anticipated and not. Emily discussed the hypothesis that you would assume your ideal body upon god-tiering. For long you had thought about what your ideal physical shape would be. Yingmei seemed to understand exactly what she wanted, and for that you envied her. You had wavered on various ideas for years, ever since you met her. She was never pressuring, always giving you time. Now, you have finally embraced the unknown, and she was right, at least in some way, all this time.

xuYingmei: 祁同志你感觉怎么样 <3  
quantumJumper: 还行  
XY: 计划还行吗  
QJ: 还行  


* * *

==> Be Yingmei

The sky is red. Sheets of blood are raining down upon the land. Meteors streak through the sky, some becoming bolides that explode in the air, some thundering into the earth. The blood boils. The sky cracks. Armies of white and black fall, flying ships and dropping troops firing missiles and beams.

Your eyes open. The sky is still red, but there is no rain or meteor shower, no armies or thunder. This is the demilitarized zone separating the Kingdom of Silicon from the Kingdom of Sorcery, a wasteland devoid of life, and you are on your back, eyes unfocused. The sprite circles about you.

MEISPRITE: closing your eyes and thinking hard isnt enough  
MEISPRITE: youll just end up at a pseudorandom time  
MEISPRITE: you really have to focus  
MEISPRITE: take a physical object in your hand and visualize it in your head  
MEISPRITE: a clock is easiest  
MEISPRITE: then visualize its past and future  
MEISPRITE: then spread your awareness outward  
YINGMEI: 为什么说英语  
MEISPRITE: im from a different timeline where im more comfortable speaking english obviously  
YINGMEI: so why do you still have an accent  
MEISPRITE: wow thats racist  
MEISPRITE: anyway you'd better practice the future seeing thing again  
MEISPRITE: if you dont wanna be like me you have to get better at this shit  


You have to sigh right now. This exercise is, if nothing else, incredibly boring.

MEISPRITE: are you hungry  
YINGMEI: why do you care  
MEISPRITE: obviously cause your physical and mental performance degrades when you cant maintain homeostasis  
MEISPRITE: by my reckoning you havent eaten in 21.8 hours  
MEISPRITE: since before i ever met you  
YINGMEI: im not hungry  
MEISPRITE: yes you are  


Your sprite hands you an alchemized bowl of white rice and chopsticks, and stares at you as if disappointed. You eat, because you have nothing better to do. It's surprisingly good.

MEISPRITE: 好姑娘  
YINGMEI: youre not my mom  
MEISPRITE: im your closest family now  
MEISPRITE: your only family in all likelihood  
YINGMEI: fuck  
MEISPRITE: language 姑娘  


You finish the bowl of rice, before your sprite brings a bowl of vegetables and meat, and a few 馒头. Soon you finish that bowl too. The sky is already pitch black; the day-night cycle of this planet only lasts one hour, befitting its video game origin.

* * *

==> Be Emily

zygoticQuandary: So the first manifestations of my "heir of space" powers has been the ability to teleport objects with volume less than about 1 cubic inch that I hold in my hand, up to a distance of about 15 meters.  
ZQ: I've been experimenting with how to utilize this power.  
ZQ: It turns out that teleporting a small rubber ball into an imp's brain is an insta-kill.  
ZQ: And after the creatures die and dissolve into grist, the rubber balls still remain.  
ZQ: It's still an insta-kill for larger creatures like ogres.  
ZQ: But it has to be a particular part of the creature's brain: the equivalent of the brain stem I think. Hitting other parts of their brain seems to just make them angry, or have no noticeable short-term effect.  
ZQ: Hypothetically one would be able to perform brain surgeries or something like a lobotomy on these creatures via the teleportation method, but obviously I don't have any bodies to dissect for their anatomy.  
ZQ: With smaller objects I could do fine-grained neural editing: target specific areas of their brain to make them go to sleep, destroy their spatial reasoning abilities or visual senses, turn them against their allies, and so on. But I'm not sure if the "sburb" simulation has such fidelity.  
ZQ: Sorry, am I rambling again?  
crypticEmpiricist: Of course not, it's fine. I really enjoy talking about this.  
ZQ: why though; it's not really that interesting  
ZQ: sorry i derailed the conversation again...  
CE: I think your updates are pretty interesting! I'm serious about that!  
CE: And it's important to share our progress in order to strategize in the game or something like that.  
ZQ: Okay... so what about your updates?  
ZQ: Is there like, a light thing? Some new "knight of light" powers, or some new progress in your world quest?  


You've started finding inscriptions carved in steel. They're unlike any human language that you know, and there is no Rosetta Stone to be found. But sometimes, if you concentrate hard enough, you have flashes of insight, where you suddenly understand the meaning of a character.

"Understand the world." That's what the most common inscription says. The message is written on every wall, on every artifact. Which leads you to believe that is your quest.

You tell Karen all of this.

ZQ: Wow, that sounds pretty cool!  
ZQ: So your land is like, an archaeology thing?  
CE: That is my working assumption.  
ZQ: The lands are supposed to be based on our personalities and interests, right?  
CE: Supposedly, although I'm beginning to question how much of that is true.  
CE: I think there are detriments to metagaming too much; my impression is that sburb adjusts for those things so we eventually reach a fixed point of difficulty.  
ZQ: If sburb really understands our personalities then it would make sense that it would take into account our metagaming...  
CE: ...and design the worlds so that attempting to metagame would lead to fucking everything up.  
ZQ: So I guess the current strategy is just "roll with it"?  
ZQ: Although that's kind of a metagame too; maybe by adopting the "roll with it" strategy, sburb has designed the worlds so that using such a strategy would mess everything up...  
CE: It seems like the only constant here is that we have to be adaptable and open to a changing situation. I don't think that counts as metagaming.  
CE: Maybe one of the best metagame-y strategies would be to avoid drama as much as possible.  
CE: Sburb runs on narrative logic, so by avoiding too much emotional drama we could stay in the interstices of the story and survive. Kind of like Aradia in the original h*mestuck.  
ZQ: lol yeah... maybe I should actually finish the homestuck sometime.  
CE: I cannot recommend that in good faith.  
CE: Anyway sburb is a demon and also very difficult to trick. Just keep that in mind?  
ZQ: lol it's always on my mind...  


* * *

==> Be Karen

You find yourself in an office that overlooks the Nuevos Alamos lab facility. You are not particularly good at naming things; the best you can do is come up with a facsimile of the old world. The consorts have made you some sort of chief here, without knowing anything about you save their vague prophecies. A bad decision, but one which turned out alright in retrospect. The abbreviated day cycles of this world apparently apply to your mental acuity; you have been able to understand all the principles of engineering and physics here much more quickly than anyone could have in reality.

KAREN: Hey, Kevin? You're back.  
KEVIN: yeah. i still haven't found mom.  
KAREN: Oh.  
KEVIN: or any of my friends. i can't find anyone else here.  
KAREN: I told you, they aren't here.  
KEVIN: i know they aren't here. i have the game knowledge pack and stuff in my head.  
KEVIN: but i can't just give up!  
KEVIN: what am i supposed to do?  
KAREN: I don't know.  
KEVIN: :(  


Kevin stares at you. You've resolved to not call him Kevinsprite; it seems dehumanizing. He's still Kevin in all ways except that his body is now a floating green-blue ghost.

KAREN: Hey, is my quest really "Become death"?  
KEVIN: that's what the game knowledge pack says i guess?  
KEVIN: but everyone else said to not trust that too much...  
KAREN: Maybe it's okay to trust it this one time.  


With nothing really to do, you check the outputs on the monitors once more; the Monte Carlo simulations for the Unity-2 design, the automated industrial programs, the inventories of your supplies, and so on. Kevin opens up your laptop and brings up the sburb server program.

KEVIN: I've been working on jiaren-gege's house just trying to make it higher.  
KEVIN: I thought there'd be something once you get high enough but there isnt  
KEVIN: it's fun though, kind of like minecraft but sort of real.  
KAREN: Jiaren-jiejie  
KEVIN: what?  
KAREN: She's a girl now...  
KEVIN: oh...  
KEVIN: is everyone here trans?  
KEVIN: are you going to be a boy now?  
KAREN: Probably not. It's too early to tell.  
KEVIN: oh... so like i'm the only boy here?  
KAREN: Sorry...  



End file.
